Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#2Love this. Totes getting bored using a gazillion tools to help onboard my users. Before you've even started a new venture, you'll find yourself hunting for the right tool for a job you didn't even expect would exist.
Which support tool. Which analytics tool. Which AB testing tool. Which wizard tool. bla bla bla.
Back to basics. I'll get my coding hat on and actually make an effort. Nice work. Will try this one myself next time I need a wizard.
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#3Very interesting. I think it's nice to see an account of building something from scratch instead of using a library. Sometimes I spend more time searching for a suitable library than it would take to build it from scratch :D
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#4I'm interested to hear what the opinion on jQuery are like these days. Even if it's a little unglamorous, this is the perfect use case - a one-off project where you have needs for cross-browser animation, resizing, DOM manip, and where something like React might be overkill, even if feasible. CSS animations might be an alternative but it depends on audience browser breakdown.
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#5Nice – what a simple, elegant solution. Like the others are saying, sometimes there's no need to reach for the heavy toolbox...
How did you measure the effectiveness of having the walkthrough on the front-page? Did you (or did you think about) hooking this up to some analytics? Perhaps see where people tend to drop-off?
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#6Very interesting. I think it's nice to see an account of building something from scratch instead of using a library. Sometimes I spend more time searching for a suitable library than it would take to build it from scratch :D
The modern developer's curse... We get better at choosing tools, but worse at building them.
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#7Nice – what a simple, elegant solution. Like the others are saying, sometimes there's no need to reach for the heavy toolbox... How did you measure the effectiveness of having the walkthrough on the front-page? Did you (or did you think about) hooking this up to some analytics? Perhaps see where people tend to drop-off?
Yeh we have it hooked up to Mixpanel so we know exactly where people drop off.
As for its effectiveness, this is always a bit tricky for SaaS, not least because the consideration stage tends to be quite long and people flick between devices, which makes attribution a bit of a nightmare. We’ve done some pretty obvious stuff, like comparing our sign up rates before and after adding the demo / recording whether people who sign up have done it etc, which is useful to know - though not always accurate.
More anecdotally, we spend a lot of time speaking with users and visitors and the demo comes up surprisingly frequently (including how we made it, which is why we wrote the post!) - it’s been a pretty quick, straight forward way of showcase Trevor’s interface.
Shortly, we’ll be adding several new steps that demo features that are commonly used by our existing customers.
Any thoughts about what else we might do / how others measure success?
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#8Wonder how this would look like if it was vanilla JS? More performant to boot.
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#9I like idea of using images for this and not trying to wrangle the actual app, much cleaner!
Re: Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through
#10I like idea of using images for this and not trying to wrangle the actual app, much cleaner!
Thanks! Yeah, we played with the idea of making a demo version of the app, for a long time. But it would have been a mega-project.